Colorado health organizations recommend making it harder to opt-out of vaccinations

Colroado policy requires only a parent's signature for a medical, religious or personal exemption from required vaccines — more than 90 percent of exemptions are for personal reasons. In Summit County, about 8 percent of the current student population has a vaccine exemption.

Abraham Garcia, 3, practices using his arm to cover his mouth while coughing during a previous National Infant Immunization Week, which takes place in April this year. The Colorado Children's Immunization Coalition is partnering with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to try to have more requirements for parents who opt-out of child vaccinations for personal reasons.

Linda Doran, a nurse who has spent the last six years in Summit School District, said the exemptions in Summit schools are mostly personal. However, she said the number of exemptions have not fluctuated drastically.

“I haven’t noticed a large increase or change in the time I’ve been here,” she said. “We’ve been at a pretty stagnant level.”

Stephanie Wasserman is the executive director of Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition, a group which helped produce a recent report on immunization exemptions in the state, led by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The report outlines recommendations for making it harder to list a personal belief exemption for a vaccination. The group’s goal, Wasserman said, is to mobilize partners and families to advance children’s health through immunizations.

“We have known Colorado has a growing issue related to more parents that are choosing to delay required immunizations, or actually exempting their children,” she said. “There is a growing problem of increasing rates of vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Colorado is one of only 18 states that allow families to exempt for personal reasons, and is one of the most lenient, Wasserman said. The first recommendation from the study is about informed refusal, making sure parents are making an educated choice, she said. It would require parents to receive more vaccine education, through a health care provider or online module. States such as Oregon, Washington and California implemented similar online training parents must take.

“So, when they are exempting, they would be doing it in a very informed way,” Wasserman said. “It would be a very strongly held personal belief, not doing it out of convenience or incorrect information.”

However, the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit organization concerned about the potential side effects of vaccines, says the number of exemptions actually fell last year.

The second recommendation of the study is to have more public disclosure, so parents can know the rates of immunizations at schools and make informed selections about where to send their children. Summit School District spokesperson Julie McCluskie said right now, there is no way of looking at rates of immunizations in other districts in the state, so it’s hard to know where the district falls comparatively.

“The data says that personal belief exemptions are the primary reasons in Colorado,” Wasserman said. “We really want to launch an effort to look closely at the immunization landscapes in Colorado, and we hope to move forward with these changes.”